There’s probably no better way to order up childhood in a tall plastic cup than buying a chocolate Fribble at Friendly’s.

The Fribble always stood out among shakes for me: Its signature ingredient — ice milk — gave it a distinctly different taste and texture from its rivals that were packed with hard ice cream. Friendly’s made a big change in the 1990s, moving to soft-serve. And I adjusted. After all, it still is pretty hard to find a frappe that isn't made from hard ice cream.

But now Friendly’s is changing the recipe again, this time to switch from soft to hard ice cream. It’s one of many elements in new CEO John Maguire’s effort to help the Wilbraham-based restaurant chain to draw a new generation of customers. He tells me he expects the change will be in place at all the company's restaurants by June. It turns out that Maguire hopes that the new Fribble, with its thicker consistency and more flavors, plays a key role in helping the chain recover from its 2011 bankruptcy filing.

Of course, founders Curtis Blake and S. Prestley Blake weren’t worrying about coming up with a frappe recipe to help the company recover from bankruptcy in the 1940s, when the Fribble recipe was first concocted. But to understand what Maguire wants to do with the chain, now owned by private equity firm Sun Capital Partners, you should recognize how the former Panera executive is enamored with its history.

As Maguire tells it, the Blake brothers tried to come up with a thick milk shake for their Friendly’s restaurants, working with the Bond ice cream shop chain in New Jersey. At a Bond shop, legend has it that the customer drank the winning recipe down in a minute, saying it was awful big and awful good. Thus, the Fribble was born, but as the Awful Awful.

The name didn’t change until the 1960s, when Friendly’s looked to expand into New Jersey. Because Bond still had rights to the Awful Awful name, Friendly’s held a contest to come up with the new name. Three people picked “Fribble” and each won $100. The name refers to the word for frivolous or whimsical, Maguire says, and is not a derivation of the word “frappe” – as many of us thought. (The Bond ice cream operation has since gone out of business, although the Awful Awful survives at Rhode Island’s Newport Creamery chain.)

Friendly’s kept the original recipe until some time in the mid-1990s, when frozen yogurt was all the rage. In response, Friendly’s rolled out soft-serve ice cream in its stores and, eventually, into its Fribbles as well.

Maguire says he wants to make the change to hard ice cream improve the quality of the shake. By the end of May, he says the soft-serve machines will be removed from all of the 360 or so Friendly’s restaurants. (The company manufacturers its own hard ice cream.) By making the switch, Friendly’s can now offer Fribbles in any of its ice cream flavors (Maguire prefers black cherry).

“We need to drive new customers into the business,” Maguire says. “What Friendly’s got doing the same old, same old, … what the company got was bankruptcy.”

Other menu changes include using fresh burger patties instead of frozen ones and served up on a fancier bun, increasing the egg and toast portions, and switching from pollock to haddock for the Fishamajig sandwich.

“We’re looking (at) every area of the menu and … making improvements wherever we can,” Maguire says.

Maguire says the changes started to roll out in January. When I went to a Friendly’s for a Fribble last month, the company’s most iconic menu item was still being made with soft-serve. But Maguire, of course, believes the new iteration of the Fribble is a big improvement on the last one. Because I’m a junk food junkie, I’ll at least give the new Fribble a chance.

And if it’s not as good? Well, at least there’s still the Awful Awful. Too bad I have to drive an hour to the nearest Newport Creamery to get it.